The fields of extragalactic research and cosmology have continued to
progress rapidly over the past three years, as detailed in the reports
of the Commission Presidents, and we are pleased to acknowledge the
award of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P.
Schmidt and Adam G. Riess for ``the discovery of the accelerating
expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae''.
The Gruber Cosmology Prize was awarded in 2009 to Wendy L. Freedman,
Robert C. Kennicutt and Jeremy Mould for their leadership of the Hubble
Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale, in 2010
to Charles Steidel for the identification and study of galaxies in the
very distant universe, and in 2011 to Marc Davis, George Efstathiou,
Carlos Frenk and Simon D.M. White for pioneering the use of numerical
simulations as a tool to model and interpret the large-scale
distribution of galaxies and dark matter.